The new ban also erases a 2012 rule that tolerated smoking of marijuana 1,000 or more feet away from picnic grounds, parking lots and other common gathering places in parks.

From now on, it is illegal to puff on marijuana joints and tobacco cigarettes in regional parks in Contra Costa and Alameda counties.

We re doing this for public health reasons, said Carolyn Jones, a park district spokeswoman, but also one of our primary missions is protecting our lands and the environment, and cigarette butts clearly can cause harm to fish and wildlife.

Regional park employees will be exempt from the ban. Park workers expressed concerns they would waste large amounts of time if they had to drive out of regional parks — some several square miles large — to take a smoke break.

Twenty-five East Bay cities and both Contra Costa and Alameda counties already ban smoking in recreation areas. The Midpeninsula Open Space District also bans smoking except in designated areas.

East Bay Park officials — with their 113,000 acres of wide open spaces — may have been slower to ban smoking because the agency has received few public complaints about smokers.

The push for the park ban came from Save the Bay and other environmental and public health groups worried about cigarette butt pollution.

Cigarette butts, which can be toxic to fish and wildlife, are the most frequent type of litter picked up in the state s annual coastal cleanup days, said Allison Chan, Save the Bay s clean bay program manager.

Cleanup crews found 10 butts per worker at the Martinez Regional Shoreline during the 2013 state cleanup, she said.

Cigarettes butts are a plastic toxic trash going to the Bay, she said.

Chan said Save the Bay advocated banning smoking in overnight camps as well to provide a stronger message about not fouling parks with butts.

Park officials, however, decided to leave overnight camp sites as smoking sanctuaries in part because campers spend longer times in parks than day visitors, Jones said.

She added, Overnight camp sites are somewhat like homes, and smoking is not banned in people s homes.

Spain came under repeated attack starting Thursday in what authorities called linked terrorist incidents, when a driver swerved a van into crowds in Barcelona’s historic Las Ramblas district, killing more than a dozen people and injuring scores of others. Early Friday, an attempted attack unfolded in a town down the coast

If there’s one superhero character whose rise might be most tied to the events of World War II, it is Captain America, who emerged from the minds of legends Joe Simon and Jack Kirby and sprung forth from an iconic 1941 debut cover on which Cap smacks Hitler right in the kisser.

A customer dining at Washington’s Oceanaire restaurant noticed an unusual line at the bottom of his receipt: “Due to the rising costs of doing business in this location, including costs associated with higher minimum wage rates, a 3% surcharge has been added to your total bill.”